The present invention relates to power consumption control of a system comprising multiple subsystems, and more particularly, to a method for performing system power budgeting within an electronic device, and an associated apparatus.
A conventional portable electronic device may suffer from the thermal issue caused by high power consumption. More particularly, the thermal issue in a conventional system on chip (SoC) architecture for implementing the conventional portable electronic device is getting worse as both of the chip area and the operational frequency of the conventional SoC architecture increase. For example, the conventional portable electronic device may be a conventional smartphone or a conventional wearable device, and a conventional thermal control mechanism may be applied when the device temperature is unacceptable to the user.
According to the related art, some conventional methods are proposed in order to solve the above problem. For example, one of the conventional methods may comprise detecting the current temperature of the conventional portable electronic device and, based on the current temperature, passively and coarsely regulating the chip voltage or frequency to lower the chip temperature. Another of the conventional methods may comprise, based on the temperature-rising slope, actively regulating the chip voltage or frequency to lower the chip temperature. However, further problems such as some side effects may be introduced. For example, bad power-efficiency is typical. In addition, coarse-grained regulation may cause excessive system performance degradation. Additionally, as the temperature slope may be regarded as a combinative heat dissipation result from all the components on the chip, the package, and the ambience, the granularity is too coarse to identify the most contributive factors on the whole system, which may restrain it from further control, such as proactive battery resource allocation. Thus, a novel architecture is required, for enhancing the thermal control with fewer side effects.